Israel needs to double hi-tech workforce
If Israel’s hi-tech arena wants to grow, it needs to get more people involved, said Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, corporate vice president at Microsoft Corporation, who also serves as the general manager of its Israel-based R&D Center and CTO of Cloud & AI Security.
“We call ourselves the Startup Nation, the hi-tech nation, but we are only 8% into hi-tech,” she said. “What we need to do as a nation is dramatically increase that number.”
She said that 15% of citizens should be in hi-tech, to truly make Israel an economic superpower.
Braverman-Blumenstyk, the first woman to head Microsoft’s Israel R&D center, said that as well as its ongoing work here, the company is developing products that are leading the Microsoft security product line.
“Only last week, we announced that we will double the number of employees that we have in the R&D center in the next few years, and this is after we increased it by 40% since February 2020,” she said.
But she admitted it will be hard to do, because in Israel there is a lack of engineers and other hi-tech workers.
“That is why it should be a national mission to fix that – and we can,” Braverman-Blumenstyk stressed.
She suggested three ways to do so, the first being education. The second, she said, would
be diversifying who enters the field.
“We really have to make sure that women, Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews – that everyone participates in hi-tech,” she said.
Microsoft is planning to open up five new centers, including in Jerusalem and Beersheba, to engage Israelis living in the periphery. Microsoft opened a center in an Arab village a few years ago and since then it has quadrupled its Arab employees.
She said that it is time to bring Israeli scientists back home.
According to Braverman-Blumenstyk, there are 150,000 Israelis working in hi-tech abroad. If just 10% of came back, that would infuse 15,000 people into the local hi-tech workforce.
“The Israeli hi-tech system is very unique; there is nothing like this in the world,” she said. “Hi-tech is the best thing that has ever happened to Israel.”